| Description |
xvi, 280 pages ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
One Who Will Go Shivering. For One Who Will Stand in the Wind. Ode to Love. Poems to Alastor:. Prothalamion. Prothalamion II. Instead. Beauty Was Once ... The Bridge. Ghosts. This Side. Numbers. Plaint Not Bitter. The Fourth Wall. Song of the Lyre. Free. |
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Sequence I.A Bird Speaks. A City Seems. A Dirge for Summer. A Preface. Another's Tongue. Appearances. Beauty Is Kind. Bereavement. But What of Trees? But Wickedness ... Cadence for an Elegy. Callando. Called Death. Ceremonial. Conclusion. Cordelia. Cricket's Spring. Dawn. Did I Not Die? Dilemma. Divestment. Doomed. Earth, Great Eyeball. Epigrams. Evasions. For Those Who Stay Up at Night. Forbidden. Harlequinade on a Curbstone. Heed. Her Portion. Heraclea (To Alastor). How Can I Die. How Does a Tree ... In the City of Grim Streets ... Interval. Invocation for Birds. Jazz Jubilate. Jews. Judgement Day. Lines in Farewell. Locomotive. Love Was No Tether ... Makeshift. On Excavating at Tell el-Amarna. On Having a Poem Accepted by a Magazine. Preparations for Departure. Requital. She Pitied Me. Spirit of This Strange Age. Tact. The Ballad of the Little Old Women of Rome. The Basket. The Carnival. The Cheat. The Crime of John Eldridge Katell. The Ghoul. The Judge. The Kiss. The Lost Isle. The Masterpiece of Lope Juan. The Music Teacher. The New Atlas. The Scourge. The Sin. The Thief. The Torch. They Pass Each Other in the Dance ... To Another. To B.S.B. (In Memoriam). To One About to Become My Friend. Tocsin. Too Happy I. Traitor. Trifle. Truth. Unforfeited. Wrappers -- Sequence II. Boy With Violets. For Rebecca West (On Reading The Judge). Lovely My Flesh ... Mama to Maria. Melinda Pours. Men and the Hymn. Notwithstanding Love. Of Stone Is My Strong Heart. Orbits. Perinot Olad. Perspective. Pestilence. Pipers. Presences. Rest. Romantic Profession. Shores. Slaves. Sobriety. Song for a Hot Day. Strange ... Tears Are a Celebration ... The Magicians. The Mysterious Whoever. The Passionate Women. The Pedestal. The Rapture. The Saint of Daros. The Same Small Way. The Shore. The Spider. The Stone. The Subterfuge. The Sweet Ascetic. The Twins. These Men Have Been ... Timothy's Lad. To a Proud Lover. To This Death. Transmigration. Tratch. Trinity. Triumph. Truth's Promise. Two Hells. Underground. Waste. Xenones and Kyranos -- Sequence III. A Kindness. Abstainer. Adorned. Adventure in a Train. Against Adventure. An Ancient Revisits. An Easier Doom. Angelica. Anniversary. Another Apple. Ars Mortis. Bacchus. Bed-ease. Belaguna. Biography. Bring Me Your Passion. Brothers. But Lies. Callers. Calotte's Lady. Coming of Age. Compromise. Dedication. Doubters. Drinking Song. Epithalamium of a Nun. Evolution of a Creature Through Several Faces. God's Proxies. Golden Plover. Grieve, Women. Houses. I Had Such Purposes. I Have a Penance Too. In Reverence. Joravaly. Jugglers. Lady of All Creation. Last Women. Life Is A Thing ... Named. Ode to the Steel Throats. Reclamation. Speaking in Me. Summons. The Call. The City. The Dawn of Darkness. The Dead Know Nothing Now. The Defense. The Door Ajar. The End. The Fourth Estate. The Gropers. The Haunt. The Hills. The House. The King of Love (To Pedants and Puritans). The Liar. The Quiet Echo. To a Cautious Friend. To a Gem. To I----- -- Sequence IV. Addresses. Ammon's Grief. Another Kind of Bird. Can Lips Be Laid Aside? Dallydilbaree. If a Woman Should Be Messiah. Jowl and Cowl. Last Nuptials. Love and a Lady. Night. Reunion. The Dissolution of One. The Quietest Song. The Victory -- Sequence V. Dimensions. A Pair. Adjustment. The Lightning. The City of Cold Women. To an Unborn Child. Initiation. Starved. Fallacies. Improprieties. For One Who Will Dust a Shadow. The Floorwalker. To the Sky. For One Who Will Bless the Devil. A Consolation. Across a Hedge. Forms. Wanderer. To a Broken Statue. For One Who Will Remember. Summary for Alastor. The Higher Order. The Spring Has Many Silences. Napoleon in the Shades. The Circus. Mary Carey. The Only Daughter. The Contraband. For One Who Will Love God. Mater Invita. For. |
| Summary |
When Laura Riding sailed for England in December, 1925, she left many of her personal belongings in the safekeeping of a friend in Greenwich Village. Among these items was a box containing the typescripts of more than two hundred poems, a few of which had been published in magazines such as The Fugitive, Poetry Nomad, Lyric West, and Contemporary Verse. Then aged twenty-four, Laura Riding had already been hailed as a leading voice of her generation. She had come to New York to pursue a life devoted to poetry, but saw her American contemporaries as lacking a seriousness, both poetic and personal, which she considered to be the poet's essential attribute. So when an invitation came from Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson in England, she accepted. In Europe she found "solitariness in which to probe the reality of poetry as a spiritual, not merely literary, inheritance." Although by 1938 she could say that "to live in, by, for the reasons of, poems is to habituate oneself to the good existence," her probing finally led her to renounce poetry; she had found poetic utterance inherently incapable of yielding the full truth-potential of words. Meanwhile the correspondence with the friend in New York had continued. In 1979 her friend wrote that she had discovered, in storage, the cache of poems left behind. Arrangements were made for its return, and during the months before her death in 1991, Laura (Riding) Jackson was preparing these early poems for publication. Rediscovering these poems of her youth, Laura (Riding) Jackson saw in them "a precise anticipation of an envisaged whole of poetry." Readers will find here the same confident authorial presence that permeates the "self-determining canon" of her poetic work, which she identified as her Collected Poems of 1938 (reprinted in 1980 by Persea as The Poems of Laura Riding), many of the themes developed in her later work, and a characteristic freshness of vision and scrupulosity of word-use. These poems are experiments in what poetry can do. They are early stepping stones on the path that led Laura (Riding) Jackson ultimately to a realization of what poetry cannot do. Those familiar with the poetry of Laura Riding will read First Awakenings with the delight of enlarged recognition, and those approaching it as an introduction to her work will find direction for the mind's journey. |
| Subject |
American poetry -- 20th century.
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American poetry. (OCoLC)fst00807348
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| Chronological Term |
1900-1999
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| Added Author |
Friedmann, Elizabeth.
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Clark, Alan J. (Alan James)
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Nye, Robert.
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| ISBN |
0892551798 |
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9780892551798 |
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0892551828 |
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9780892551828 |
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